Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Ed Whelan - True beleiver or cultist?

2015—In Adkins v. City of New York, federal district judge Jed S. Rakoff rules that “transgender people are a so-called ‘quasi-suspect class’” and that governmental treatment of people who identify as transgender must be subject to “intermediate” judicial scrutiny.

Under Rakoff’s approach, he and other federal judges, in the supposed name of the Constitution, would be deciding such matters as whether boys who think they’re girls must be allowed to use the girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, and showers in public schools.

Liberal Judicial Activism

M. Edward Whelan III has enviable intellectual credentials. Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, Harvard law and so on. However, Whelan is also an ultra-conservative Catholic who defers to the teachings of the Church on many matters. His take on gender identity seems to be consistent with the pope's assertion that gender is an ideology.

An ideology is a belief system. In contrast, science is based on evidence. The scientific consensus is that a trans girl is, for all intents and purposes, a girl. The fact that she has male genitalia is irrelevant to gender. No kid ever volunteered to be transgender. They do so to mitigate the symptoms of gender dysphoria and medical science offers no alternatives.

Trans youth are a tiny minority of school children and, possibly, the most vulnerable. Why, then, are religious conservatives so obsessed over this small number of school kids? Suppose they had an LGBT child. How would they want him or her to be treated? Orthodox Catholics have transgender children too as religion has yet to inoculate any parent. When will this bullshit come to an end?

All I want is for kids to be treated decently and with the respect that they deserve. Is that really too much to ask for? It starts with an appreciation of the child before considering their sexuality. He or she may have a fine mind or athletic ability or have desirable personality traits. If necessary (and rarely so), sexual identity is in the also-happens-to-be category of the person.

Whelan goes all in to protect a fertilized human egg. Some of those fetuses grow to have gender dysphoria. Mr. Whelan needs to meet some trans kids and their parents. He then might stop referring to transgender girls dismissively as “boys who think they're girls.” Whelan being Whelan, he probably would not.